Winner Update: Golden Heart Ranch

So I’m Rose from Golden Heart Ranch and we work with special needs teens and young adults. We have a 22 acre ranch just down the street here where we do a number of things for our special needs young adults and teens. We have gardening classes and art classes and extensive cooking classes. And we do fitness and we do track and we do a ton of programs, a lot of social skills and a lot of life skills programs at our ranch. We have a challenger Baseball League, I think this is our 13th or 14th season. I couldn’t remember on the way here, but we’ve got about 60 participants. It started a couple of weeks ago. We go from five to 25 years old except some of our kids hit 25 and they just keep coming anyway. And we started life programs at the ranch, which we’re very excited about which includes expressive art. We are doing a number of programs with our animals out there. We continue…cooking classes is really one of our base programs that we bring in a number of guys and girls. And the result that we see from our cooking classes is quite phenomenal because they actually go to the chicken coop and get the eggs out and bring it back to the kitchen. And I can’t tell you how many parents have come to me and said, “Our kids normally, you know, they don’t want anything to do with the kitchen, but now they’re helping. They’re in the kitchen chopping, they’re in the kitchen getting involved in actual, you know, this beautiful skill of cooking and all the involvement that that creates.” We are very excited because I think I touched on residential last time I was here because that’s one of the things Golden Heart Ranch is going to do is create permanent housing for our guys and girls. So we have just in the past couple months had our onestop, gotten to the next place for residential. And we’re very excited because we actually know how many houses we can have, what the floor plans are going to look like, how much square feet we can have and how many residents we’ll be able to house at Golden Heart Ranch. And, and that’s a really big thing for us because you guys probably aren’t familiar with this, but 90% of our kids can’t leave home because there’s nowhere for them to go. There’s a real crisis in housing for a special needs guys and girls. So I was the recipient last time and I can’t thank you guys enough. It’s meant so much to us. And it’s, as Jay said, it’s the impact of all those dollars at once that make a big difference to us as non-profits.